Way-Out West

The director Anthony Mann, an early master of the film noir, turned to the Western in midcareer, and his second, “The Furies” (Criterion), from 1950, is one of the greatest—in effect, a frontier noir with epic ambitions and Shakespearean audacities.

The story revolves around T. C. Jeffords (Walter Huston), a self-made rancher, proud and vain, who keeps his strong-willed yet dependent daughter, Vance (Barbara Stanwyck), close to him in a strange, and subliminally incestuous, bond. The complex plot joins sex, money, and power, as when T.C. tries to buy off the gambler (Wendell Corey) whose father T.C. had killed and for whom Vance has fallen, or when Vance battles T.C.’s aging, insidious consort (Judith Anderson), who is scheming for control of the homestead.

Mann, who was born in California, knew that the wide-open spaces of the West were anything but empty, and portrayed its multicultural heritage long before the concept became familiar. To get the mortgage that will save his ranch, T.C. has to clear his land of squatters—Hispanic families who have lived there for centuries, including that of Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland), who is Vance’s lifelong admirer and, remarkably, her dearest platonic friend. (Their tensions, sarcasms, and tender rituals contribute to what is perhaps the cinema’s most touching depiction of male-female friendship.)

Mann brings these passions to the screen with energy and intelligence, staging the archetypal violence (much of it occurring between men and women, behind closed doors) in scenes of quiet, chilling immobility. Stanwyck’s inward performance, one of her most brilliant—even the back of her head is somehow stunningly expressive—contrasts with Huston’s gleefully over-the-top histrionics, which actors playing crazed patriarchs have strained to match ever since. Mann emphasizes the characters’ ambiguous blend of outsized evil and noble virtue, eliciting grand, tragic overtones from Charles Schnee’s adaptation of the orotund novel by Niven Busch (included in the box).

Mann quickly became a master of the Western; his “Winchester ’73,” also from 1950, remade James Stewart’s career. (It’s included with two other Mann-Stewart Westerns, “The Far Country” and “Bend of the River,” in a six-disk boxed set from Universal, “James Stewart: The Western Collection.”) Mann and Gary Cooper collaborated on the gaunt, bitter “Man of the West” (M-G-M), in 1958, also a new DVD release. Over the years, the director’s command of landscape and action developed, but, for drama, “The Furies,” which fully lives up to its title, remains unrivalled. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the June 30, 2008, issue.